But the US is exceptional: it’s a good state actor, it’s just other state actors that are bad, especially when they won’t give us what we bloody well want.

One of the things that has crossed my mind is the question of whether we’re seeing more corporate/big government hacks than in the past (i.e. the quantity of hacks is going up), or whether the recent publicization by the MSM of these corporate/big government hacks is a new wrinkle in the same old propaganda suit (i.e. sell the need for cyberwar by scaring the peons).

Lest I miss an option, let me say that that I don’t neglect the possibility that it could be both.

Regardless, one thing I am sure of is that the ramping up by the US government and its MIC allies for the need for there to be US Cyberwarriors is another endless money trough funded by us poor taxpayer peons for the MIC pigs to wallow in.

And like almost every instance since WWII, I am sure that the overwhelming majority of the billions funding this new US Cyberwarrior trough will be wallowed wastefully away with almost nothing of consequence to show for the effort. Nothing but emptier wallets in rube pockets and a Constitution no longer than a Post-it® Note.

At the same time that we’re expected to regard this kind of attack as so awful, there are semiofficial leaks that the Stuxnet attack on Iranian computers was the result of joint work of the U.S. and Israeli governments.

By the way, if the U.S. and/or Israel were capable of the Stuxnet attack, would they not also have been capable of this cyberattack on the IMF?

Remember, NSA’s technical intelligence capabilities have long been regarded as one of the U.S.’s chief military assets. They weren’t hesitant about bugging diplomats at the UN in the runup to the Iraq war.

As part of the original post seems to say, the lede appears credible. However, I also agree the making of one workstation in the Imf network into a mole is an interesting detail, if accurate. I tend toward thinking of at least two rudimentary frames of reference in the latter regard. To me, more than the imF is in the offing for snoop shoppers, given the similar agencies and regional parallels globally. There is the oecd; there is a development bank for Africa; the network of foreign aid intermediaries likely could be envisioned as a fairly fully meshed network, although each would have its private reserve, too. The reasonable hypotheses might be numerous; a hackor might begin by wanting some insider feedback on how far up to float the yuan. Yet, the targets might be multiple southern europe economies, as commenters suggest; I picture German bankers laughing. The premier of Italy also might feel sufficiently diversified and fortified that he could share the joke perceived by germany financiers.

Another immediate image the post engendered, for me was a standard Geneva world telecom conference poster of the telco topologies of the globe. Besides landline coper, fiber, and now wireless species, there are the international consortia owned space platforms various sorts of specialized orbits; I do not know if they are still doing little Leo and *big* Leo (somewhat cute acronym that, low earth orbit); there are also stationary platforms in far earth orbit, less subject to the gravitational demise of the Leo design; for example, an Egypt movie production house might upload to a satellite serving arab speaking countries pretty far away in southern central asia; or the French space agency may launch a communications satellite owned by some northwest African arab country. I guess I am saying there are numerous physical paths of approaching networks. I have been thinking a lot about germany and france, especially, with respect to the arab spring peoples media infrastructure. Before global dereg, most of the internationally leading vendors of telco switch gear were pretty much state owned entities from Europe, and the indirectly government sanctioned monopoly telco in the US at the time. For several decades I know of, Canada marketed a plain old switch that was, in some analysts* view, less robust than what the US Bell entity was selling to foreign governments, adhering to the tech euphemisms of the day here. For people who understand, I think the current newsitem well could be a promising harbinger of some interesting forensics. As an afterthought, mostly, I had been wondering what IT expertise, as well as robotics tech, the new chief at DoD may be transporting. From another imagined perspective, suppose some resource rich nations are interested in mapping extraction strategies to fit the next fifteen year plan, and global business deals based upon data purloined from imF profiles of firstworld countries. Then again, I would wonder if the imF keeps deliberately misleading files in hackable memory, so once stolen the behavior they engender would be telltale.

I landed on an item just up at NYT and popped over to EW’s to leave a link about how personal financial data was hacked via the browser: “Thieves Found Citigroup Site an Easy Entry“:

Using the Citigroup customer Web site as a gateway to bypass traditional safeguards and impersonate actual credit card holders, a team of sophisticated thieves cracked into the bank’s vast reservoir of personal financial data, until they were detected in a routine check in early May…

…In the Citi breach, the data thieves were able to penetrate the bank’s defenses by first logging on to the site reserved for its credit card customers.

Once inside, they leapfrogged between the accounts of different Citi customers by inserting vari-ous account numbers into a string of text located in the browser’s address bar.

Jesus Christ on a cracker…

re: marksb@19, thanx, re: fully packet switched.